SharePoint 2013 and Yammer – best social tools for your company

Hello,
As you know, the future of big projects is in social collaboration. All large companies try to make communications inside of the organization simple and productive. So, the question is “Which tool should we use for social collaboration – Yammer or SharePoint 2013?” is the one most asked and discussed. Let`s try to understand this question and answer it in this post.

Yammer

Yammer is a private social network for your company. Please see the following list of the main Yammer features:

Yammer groups. You can setup a Group for all teams, projects or interests. There are two great features such as Quick Access and Announcements you can use in Groups.

Yammer user profiles. Share your knowledge or find the experts you need more easily. Add managers and reports to create a company chat together with your employees. Leader boards display people with the most messages, replied-to messages, and liked messages.

Yammer conversations. You can share an update, add documents, post pools and notify other co-workers by looping them into a conversation using @their_name. See who’s online now and start a private discussion with one or more employees.

Yammer document collaboration. Share MS Office documents, PDFs, images and videos across team and get feedback from them. Collect notes and view all the edits made to a document. Additionally you can email a file and mark files as official and read-only.

Yammer external communication. Great option! You can create a dedicated online workspace to collaborate with business contacts outside of your company and you can easily switch between internal and external networks.

Yammer security. Bring the look and feel of your company. Easily manage access to your Yammer network, sync directories, manage and export network data according to company policies. Set password policies and use the session management to see users devices are logged into with possibility to log them out.

SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 vs Yammer. Microsoft social tools comparison.

Microsoft continues to release updates to both social tools and will continue to innovate no matter which platform you chose and use. As for the question I mentioned above, here is the most popular answer on it:

If you have no restrictions, use Yammer.

If your organization needs to use a dedicated hosting tool, using SharePoint 2013 social features is the best way to meet it.

Yammer is more flexible for collaboration with external partners or customers. If you want to initiate real-time participation and sharing events, meetings or reviews use Yammer with its out-of-box options. But if you want create an intranet portal with the same templates, structured information and web parts – the best tool for you is SharePoint 2013 with social features. SharePoint content is more structured and there are additional options you can use, like workflows, forms, web parts.

Currently, Microsoft is working on the integration between Yammer and SharePoint. After it is finished you would be able to get all best from these two social tools. But now, let your teams decide which of these social platforms is best to use. Please keep in mind that your team is the best decision maker of technologies for your organization.

PlexHosted has a great option for you! You can integrate Yammer with PlexHosted Dedicated SharePoint servers.

Start with the PlexHosted SharePoint hosting today and improve your business tomorrow!